Sketchbook: Coontang
polycounter lvl 5
Editing my old posts as they sucked and took too long to load 
I advise skipping to most recent post.
I advise skipping to most recent post.
Replies
here's a set of good tutorials on making your character useable:
http://seithcg.com/wordpress/?p=1329
http://seithcg.com/wordpress/?p=1372
The Ludus has been abandoned because I just can't get the terrain right, I've tried using CryEngine terrain, terrain with geometry parts and now purely geometry and I'm still not happy with it.
If anyone has any suggestions on that it would be helpful.
The next bit is kind of a rant, more at myself than anything, so if you don't want to read that stop reading now
I've been trying to improve my anatomy lately through 2d studies in the hopes that it will improve my sculpting. Thinking about it though I really don't have a lot to show for the last few months, this needs to change if I'm going to improve. I have a few sketches, an unfinished sculpey model and an unfinished fantasy art piece. Maybe it's time to set myself a challenge, one new finished piece posted here every week, yes let's try that. See you next week...
Original
Concept
This is my current progress on the 3D version, any feedback is much appreciated.
Your design is really cool, and I'm loving your fabrics (both in the concept and in the sculpt!), but her face is lacking depth to the point of looking a little... dead. She could use a little love in that area!
'Paintover', with a Redline explaining what i did (Hope you don't mind!):
Most of this is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll go into a bit more detail for the sake of breaking it down into steps you can actually tackle.
First thing I have to address here is actually a more shallow one, but something that struck me immediately; her eyebrows come down to the end of her brow. I've never really thought about this, but it looked really weird to me. Turns out, proportionally....
This is an ideal eyebrow, of course, but certainly they shouldn't really come down past the fold of the upper eyelid.
Secondly, the muscle/fat deposits above the upper lip protrude a little too far, too suddenly. I feel like the crease coming from the nose should perhaps be on a wider angle, rather than pointing directly at the corner of the lips. I'd also suggest studying some pictures of a woman's lips a little further; the overall shape is a little bit off (though not too much; this is more an aesthetic thing, I think).
See how the line of upper lip sort of curls under the opening of the mouth before it ends? It's not too clear that yours do that, so it reads as if they don't and looks just a teeny bit off.
Last thing that's actually very important; her eye is much too shallow in her face, and seems to miss some landmark folds, fat deposits, etc (eg, the upper lid fold). I'm still learning here, so I can't explain it too well in words, but compare what I've sketched in with what you have and hopefully you'll be able to see it.
The shallowness is more important, though, at the moment all of her features are concentrated very strongly in the front part of her face, which makes her look quite hard and square, as well as just slightly unnerving.
Okay, well, I'm quite long winded and now this looks like a lot. Oops.
Overall, these are all smaller parts of the sculpt, and the only reason I'm picking out what looks like a lot is because faces are super important. If a face looks even the teeniest bit unnatural, it will let the entire model down. Which would be a shame, honestly, because the rest of your sculpt and design are lovely.
I'm looking forward to seeing this progress, keep up the good work! (And damn, I'd kill for that bolero [and the shirt, to be entirely honest]. It's gorgeous.)
The 1st prop is a flintlock pistol knife, I stumbled across these when doing research for my other flintlock and thought it was a cool idea.